Published texts
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2023
- Please test the parallel mark-region collector for SBCL How to build the new parallel GC for SBCL, and how to tell if it's working.
- Parallel garbage collection for SBCL The design and performance of a non-moving parallel generational garbage collector for SBCL. Presented at the European Lisp Symposium, with slides here.
2022
- The next 700 virtual machines Virtual machine will eat themselves, by being similar enough that most can subsume each other. This can be furthered by making it easier to target abstract machines, and using object capabilities to allow cohabitation of languages and incremental extension to languages.
- Zero Feet: a proposal for a systems-free Lisp A systems language is a collection of things that don't fit into a modular language. There shouldn't be one.
- I don't want to go to Chel-C When "simple" programming languages aren't.
- The Lisp Curse Redemption Arc Pondering marketing "strategies" and how we aren't supposed to be productive in Common Lisp.
2021
- The one-more-re-nightmare compiler A pile of regular expression derivatives, myths about Ediware, SIMD instruction selection and using the Common Lisp compiler as a backend for a regular expression compiler.
- The poverty of "post-open source" Post-open source falls short on what improvements it was supposed to make. It prefigures a boring future, mostly because it carries on productivist logic, and makes programming even more of a difficult and esoteric tool. Capitalism isn't the only problem threatening peer production; it is rather threatened by more general principles, which even radicals can believe.
- Terminal boredom A practical example of how "minimalism" tends to blow up into large hairy problems. We find one pathological case for the Gemini protocol, for which a document requires exponentially more effort to read than it could; and compare the size of common clients for the protocol to advertised sizes.
- A replicated object system A technical description of the Netfarm replicated object system, and how it may be used to implement the core replicated data structure and algorithms used in the Matrix messaging protocol.
- Utena: a system to fulfil my desire for maximalist computing Notes on the Utena platform, which is designed as a networked meta-medium which facilitates pure message passing, proxying remote objects and transparent modularity.
- Ethical software is a sad joke Why it is evidently not ethical to go around making people look worthless in order to promote your poor "ethical" framework, and why one must consider how to support the producers of ethical software.
- Quantifying Nothing At All The paper by Matthew Hertz and Emery D. Berger, which some people use as an "argument" against tracing garbage collection, doesn't really quantify anything at all.
- Here is a Loud Announcement: Applied Language announces Applied Language On the term "maximalist computing".
2020
- Software and Anarchy A short book which covers many of the concepts we discuss in later articles, including our notion of a "liberatory technology" for programmers, the problems with cooperatives as they are commonly presented, how to facilitate and benefit from disagreement in a community, and social forms of centralisation on so-called decentralised social media.
- Translate what data? and Cāā-dating schema-based design Why protocols are superior to bare data structures when handling incompatibilities in distributed systems, and some techniques for deciding between implementations of a protocol and inferring translation logic between two protocols.
A Parastatal Problem "Ethical" software is more than licensing, despite the proposals made by a small group of grifters who are popular on the Fediverse. At least some care should be taken to not make bogus statistics, to not create a security hole for the user, and to allow for the possibility of hierarchy-less association.
The start of a series of articles on "how not to do things", which now covers "Ethical software" and "Terminal boredom".